Regional Research Laboratory. Bhubaneswar-751 013, India Manuscript received 9 September 2003, revised 30 August 2004, accepted 2 September 2004 Unlike dehydration of the dihydrade chlorides of other metal ions of Mn-Cu series, CuCl2,2H2O dehydrates in one step without pre-melting. The anhydrous salt decomposes in air three steps yielding CuO as final product. The kinetics of dehydrartion studied by non-isothermal method show that while in static air progress of reaction interface (R3) fits the data best, in flowing nitrogen random nucleation within bulk material (FI) appears to be the best fit model. However, the rate of first step of decomposition follows nucleation and growth (A3) with an E value of 106.2 kJ mol-1.